Halloween is fast approaching, and if you don’t want to deal with a security nightmare, it might be prudent to take another look at your passwords. Splashdata has released a list of top passwords of 2012 compiled from files containing millions of stolen passwords posted online by hackers.

The primary aim of the CSRA is to bridge the gap between Government-funded R&D efforts and commercial cyber-security solutions. It will bring together expertise from member companies and the R&D efforts of the Government.

This operating system from Kaspersky Lab has security as its top priority, but it will also address issues of availability by providing hot reboot-less patches. Nonetheless, it will also proactively be checked for security exploits to stay one-step ahead of hackers.

A Romanian university teaching assistant Radu Dragusin has discovered a publicly accessible FTP server that stored around 100,000 usernames and passwords in plain text. The passwords where found in logs stored in the FTP server. There where around 100GBs of logs which contained 376 million HTTP requests. Out of these, 411,308 entries contained passwords.

Flame was arguably the next big thing in the state sponsored malware section after Stuxnet. As we had previously reported, Flame is a malware that was used to infect computers in the Middle East for espionage purposes.

In an operation named Operation b70, Microsoft was able to disrupt the Nitol botnet. The operation was carried out by Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit under the permission of U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.